Saturday, September 15, 2007

Iraq is a crime scene --Bush's crime scene where the evidence against him is found. A war of naked aggression, what Bush did to Iraq is a capital crime under US Codes, prohibited by the Nuremberg Principles which loom like a specter over his criminal administration. Nuremberg remains the most effective and damning indictment of anyone who would hijack the apparatus of state to wage wars of aggression or to perpetrate mass murder and/or torture under the cover of a national sovereignty.

The Nuremberg Charter is largely the result of work done by the US in the weeks and months following the collapse of the Third Reich. Because of Nuremberg, international law gives no cover to leaders of state, presidents, prime ministers, dictators, or princes. Under Nuremberg, all who would commit such crimes bear an individual and criminal responsibility though their crimes may have been done in the name of the state.

"If the people knew what we had done, they would chase us down the street and lynch us."

- George H.W. Bush

It's never too late to do the right thing!

-The Existentialist Cowboy

It was just last year, days after his resignation, that Time magazine reported that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was in deep trouble for his role in US wars against Afghanistan and Iraq. Legal documents were filed in Germany seeking criminal investigations and prosecutions of Rumsfeld, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, former CIA director George Tenet and other senior US officials and officers. At issue are the roles they played in illegal detentions and abuses at both Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs say that one of the witnesses who will testify on their behalf is former Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, the one-time commander of all US military prisons in Iraq. Karpinski — who the lawyers say will be in Germany next week to publicly address her accusations in the case — has issued a written statement to accompany the legal filing, which says, in part: "It was clear the knowledge and responsibility [for what happened at Abu Ghraib] goes all the way to the top of the chain of command to the Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ."

European countries have a way of going after people in criminal cases that we're not familiar with in the US They have a procedure where human rights groups and others, as well as the victims themselves, can go and ask a prosecutor to investigate someone for criminal liability. In the US, of course, you can knock on a prosecutor's door but then he shuts it in your face and it's all over. In Germany and other European countries, if the prosecutor shuts the door in your face you can go to court and the prosecutor must have a valid reason for not investigating. So that's a big difference. Germany also has a law, like some other European countries are beginning to have, that says certain crimes are subject to prosecution no matter where in the world they're committed, and even if there's no connection between that particular country and the alleged crime. And certain crimes are considered so serious and so heinous that every country is considered to have an interest in prosecuting them.

The November 14, 2006 criminal complaint is a request for the German Federal Prosecutor to open an investigation and, ultimately, a criminal prosecution that will look into the responsibility of high-ranking US officials for authorizing war crimes in the context of the so-called “War on Terror.” The complaint is brought on behalf of 12 torture victims – 12 Iraqi citizens who were held at Abu Ghraib prison and one Guantánamo detainee – and is being filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH), the Republican Attorneys' Association (RAV) and others, all represented by Berlin Attorney Wolfgang Kaleck. The complaint is related to a 2004 complaint that was dismissed, but the new complaint is filed with much new evidence, new defendants and plaintiffs, a new German Federal Prosecutor and, most important, under new circumstances that include the resignation of Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense and the passage of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 in the US, which attempts to grant officials retroactive immunity from prosecution for war crimes.

Executive Summary of the Complaint’s Allegations:

From Donald Rumsfeld on down, the political and military leaders in charge of ordering, allowing and implementing abusive interrogation techniques in the context of the “War on Terror” since September 11, 2001, must be investigated and held accountable.

The complaint alleges that American military and civilian high-ranking officials named as defendants in the case have committed war crimes against detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and in the US-controlled Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

The complaint alleges that the defendants “ordered” war crimes, “aided or abetted” war crimes, or “failed, as civilian superiors or military commanders, to prevent their commission by subordinates, or to punish their subordinates,” actions that are explicitly criminalized by German law. The US administration has treated hundreds if not thousands of detainees in a coercive manner, in accordance with “harsh interrogation techniques” ordered by Secretary Rumsfeld himself that legally constitute torture and/or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, in blatant violation of the provisions of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, the 1984 Convention Against Torture and the 1977 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights – to all of which the United States is a party. Under international humanitarian treaty and customary law, and as re-stated in German law, these acts of torture and/or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment constitute war crimes.

The US torture program that resulted in war crimes was aided and abetted by the government lawyers also named in this case: former Chief White House Counsel (and current Attorney General) Alberto R. Gonzales, former Assistant Attorney General Jay Bybee, former Deputy Assistant Attorney General John Yoo, General Counsel of the Department of Defense William James Haynes, II and Vice President Chief Counsel David S. Addington. While some of them claim to merely have given legal opinions, those opinions were false or clearly erroneous and given in a context where it was known and foreseeable to these lawyers that torture would be the result. Not only was torture foreseeable, but this legal advice was given to facilitate and aid and abet torture as well as to attempt to immunize those who tortured. Without these opinions, the torture program could not have occurred. The infamous “Torture Memo” dated August 1, 2002, is the key document that redefined torture so narrowly that such classic and age old torture techniques as water-boarding were authorized to be employed and were employed by US officials against detainees. ...

All these charges must be revised or updated to include Bush himself. Certainly, given his dictatorial style nothing was done but upon his order. In the case of Rumsfeld, it is simply inconceivable that the policies leading directly to the Abu Ghraib atrocities were not ordered by Bush or agreed to in meetings between the two conspirators.

The US itself had taken a strong position with regard to Nazi war criminals. Winston Churchill had proposed that they be shot summarily. An international position, supported by the US, established the concept that has since become international law. That principle makes it a war crime to launch a war of aggression. The US attack and invasion of Iraq is, on its face, such a crime. The Bush administration made a fraudulent case to the UN, evidence that it knew Hussein did not have WMD but was intent upon war in any case.

The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under; international law:

Crimes against peace:

Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances;

Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (i).

War crimes:Violations of the laws or customs of war which include, but are not limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave-labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or illtreatment of prisoners of war, of persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity.

Crimes against humanity:Murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation and other inhuman acts done against any civilian population, or persecutions on political, racial or religious grounds, when such acts are done or such persecutions are carried on in execution of or in connection with any crime against peace or any war crime.

These were the charges that the chief US prosecutor, Justice Robert H. Jackson (1892-1954), brought against German Nazi leaders for judgment at Nuremberg. As Justice Jackson put it: "We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it."

We must work to bring about the equivalent of an international Nuremberg trial for the Bush administration, the American perpetrators of crimes against humanity in Guantánamo, Iraq, Afghanistan, and the CIA's secret prisons. There is no dearth of evidence. Much of it is available from documented international reports by human-rights organizations. Our own Democratic congress, however, seems to have conceded the lead to European leaders who have already begun to assess the mountains of evidence that accuse Bush and principles in his administration. There will be an investigation, but that it is not done by our own congress is tragic --a fact that may have wider consequences.

...armed groups opposed to the US-led multinational force and Iraq's government are showing utter disdain for the lives of Iraqi civilians and others, continuing a pattern of war crimes and crimes against humanity".

The rest of the case may be hard to press --not because Bush is innocent but because the record of his war crimes is being re-written as we write and post. It's Orwellian. Whomever controls the narrative, controls the war and hence Bush's fate. The Bush team has worked mightily to dominate that narrative. They might have succeeded with each ex post facto rationale for war were it not for the internet. At this point, it is beyond even Bush to rewrite, re-program, or redesign every blog, every website, every post, every digital photo, every PDF file, every video clip on every computer, every hard drive, every server in the world. The top down MSM rolled over for the Bush gang of information thugs. An amorphous web is new terrain, a different topology. With any luck, it will continue to morph whenever Bushies have it in the cross hairs.

Physicists often talk of the "arrow of time" as if time consisted of a single path from past to future. In fact, the topology of time is much more complex. Even if expanding gases reversed themselves back into an opened jar, the new event could theoretically be recorded by a forward moving movie or video camera. For each such "reversal of time", for example, there is a theoretically infinite number of external timelines. Thus it is with Bush and his nemesis --the internet. A veritable Hydra, each severed head sprouts two, a hundred, ten thousand, a theoretically infinite number of new heads, new critics that will not shut up.

In view of the greatly expanded definition of "enemy combatants" in the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which George W. Bush signed in October, the Pentagon would be well advised to greatly increase the number of cells in the new compound. Under the new law, the president can designate as "an enemy combatant" any noncitizen picked up anywhere in the world, even permanent legal alien residents here.

These newly imprisoned "enemy combatants" will include not only those engaged in direct hostilities against the United States, but also loosely defined "supporters" of the enemy.

Passionately arguing against this legislation on the Senate floor, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont claimed, "This provision would perpetuate the indefinite detention of hundreds of individuals . . . without any recourse to justice whatever. . . . This is un-American!"

Much is at stake, not the least of which, is whether or not our civilization has learned anything from several thousand years of bloody warfare, to include the genocides of Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot. Laws that exempt the powerful yet bring the weight of organized justice to bear upon only weaker nations is, in fact, no law at all but that of the jungle. If the human race will not behave civilly then it is doomed by the weapons of its own creation.

If we, the people, are ultimately condemned by a world court for our complicity and silence in these war crimes, we can always try to echo those Germans who claimed not to know what Hitler and his enforcers were doing. But in Nazi Germany, people had no way of insisting on finding out what happened to their disappeared neighbors.

We, however, have the right and the power to insist that Congress discover and reveal the details of the torture and other brutalities that the CIA has been inflicting in our name on terrorism suspects.

Only one congressman, Oregon's Democratic senator Ron Wyden, has insisted on probing the legality of the CIA's techniques—so much so that Wyden has blocked the appointment of Bush's nominee, John Rizzo, from becoming the CIA's top lawyer. Rizzo, a CIA official since 2002, has said publicly that he didn't object to the Justice Department's 2002 "torture" memos, which allowed the infliction of pain unless it caused such injuries as "organ failure . . . or even death." (Any infliction of pain up to that point was deemed not un-American.) Mr. Rizzo would make a key witness in any future Nuremberg trial.

Following are the last several paragraphs of Justice Robert Jackson's summation to the jury at Nuremberg. Everything said by Jackson can be said now of Bush, and with respect to "truth" of the GOP as a party. In this singular, important and defining characteristic, there is, in fact, no difference between the GOP and the Nazi Party of Hitler's Third Reich.

The record is full of other examples of dissimulations and evasions. Even Schacht showed that he, too, had adopted the Nazi attitude that truth is any story which succeeds. Confronted on cross-examination with a long record of broken vows and false words, he declared in justificationand I quote from the record:

"I think you can score many more successes when you want to lead someone if you don't tell them the truth than if you tell them the truth."

This was the philosophy of the National Socialists. When for years they have deceived the world, and masked falsehood with plausibilities, can anyone be surprised that they continue their habits of a lifetime in this dock? Credibility is one of the main issues of this Trial. Only those who have failed to learn the bitter lessons of the last decade can doubt that men who have always played on the unsuspecting credulity of generous opponents would not hesitate to do the same, now.

It is against such a background that these defendants now ask this Tribunal to say that they are not guilty of planning, executing, or conspiring to commit this long list of crimes and wrongs. They stand before the record of this Trial as bloodstained Gloucester stood by the body of his slain king. He begged of the widow, as they beg of you: "Say I slew them not." And the Queen replied, "Then say they were not slain. But dead they are..." If you were to say of these men that they are not guilty, it would be as true to say that there has been no war, there are no slain, there has been no crime.

The following video exposes the multifarious and nefarious lies that Bush and his minions have told about Iraq to justify what is, in fact, the heinous and capital crimes that they have committed there. Among them WMD and the more insidious lie that Saddam had something to do with 911. Like everything else said by Bush, it is a bald-faced lie.

Friday, September 14, 2007

It was Margaret Atwood who called Bush, the greatest threat to world peace. What Atwood didn't mention was that Bush derives his power from a deliberate and well-planned attack on our language. George Orwell predicted it in the now classic 1984. His works remain the textbook examples of how governments manipulate people by first manipulating the language.

Orwell describes a fascist, totalitarian government that spies on its own citizens, denies reality, and exploits a perpetual state of war. Orwell's Big Brother succeeds in re-writing History, reshaping thought by reshaping language, creating an alternate reality.

It is true that in a fascist state all is done in order to maintain the regime in absolute power. Nevertheless, the lesson of 1984 is less about the state than it is about the individual. When states are absolutely powerful, the individual ceases to exist. Individuals robbed of the ability to exercise free will are denied personhood. From a theological standpoint, individuals are robbed of their very souls.

In order to acknowledge the collapse of Soviet Communism and the failure of fascism to reemerge as a potent political force, I ditched Orwell's oppressive totalitarian state in favor of an entertainment-fueled nihilism in which dimwitted citizens frittered away their lives watching web TV and working at slightly overpaid jobs to buy worthless junk ... on web TV, natch. Where Orwell envisioned endless rows of soldiers marching in perfect unison to the strains of the Two-Minute Hate, I saw a world where nations had been replaced by trading blocs and the objects of hatred were the immigrants in our midst.

Images of 1984are seared into our memories --big brother, the telescreen, the grotty bedroom, the cubicle, the memory hole, the drab gray existence, the rat cage. But 1984 is as much about language. Not just sub-text, language is a major player. It is the means by which Big Brother creates an alternate reality, the source of "his" power. Language is how Big Brother gets inside your head.

The "official language" is Newspeak, remembered for the slogans: war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength. From newspeak we derive doublespeak which most certainly describes how the Bush administration and a sycophantic news media has empowered Bush --Homeland Security for the unlawful and omnipresence of Big Brother itself; operation Iraqi freedom for what is, in fact, a war of naked aggression; war on terrorism for a perpetual war which, on its face and by definition, cannot be won.

Interestingly, the origin of "Operation Iraqi Freedom" gives the game away. It was originally called Operation Iraqi Liberation, or OIL.

When the GOP uses the term "war" it is done so for the emotional reaction that it is sure to provoke. Americans rallied to defeat real enemies in World War II, a lesson that the GOP has never forgotten. The GOP is altogether too eager to elicit the same response with phony wars waged on crime, porn, drugs, and illegal immigrants. Real wars, however, are fought between armies representing nations. The GOP has always envied FDR his real war.

The War on Terrorism is a GOP code word for global police state or police action. A very hardcore GOP base knows precisely what Bush is up to and supports it. Like Reagan's War on Drugs or the war on porn, some kind of war will always be waged so that the GOP might maintain themselves in power.

The most glaring use of Newspeak is the invention of what I have chosen to call "focus group phrases" as they are invented, full cloth, in focus groups. "Al Qaeda in Iraq" is just such a phrase, designed make a lazy populace forget that the war was begun upon a pack of blackhearted lies about WMD. The GOP use it because it tests well in focus groups. The media like it because it wraps up in three little words a long and complicated lie. It omits the obvious fact that al Qaeda had not been "in Iraq" until the US was "in Iraq". The US in Iraq is a threat to civilization, the world.

When WMD were not found, the history of the Bush administration became the list of equally absurd ex post facto rationales for a war of aggression. It is significant that Bush will never tell the nation his real reasons he bombed Afghanistan, his real reasons for attacking and invading Iraq. I will. Bush bombed Afghanistan so that Unocal might build a pipeline through that country to the Caspian Sea. The Taliban was targeted because they had apparently driven a hard bargain in a meeting they held with Unocal officials in Tom DeLay's old stomping grounds --Sugar Land, TX. Iraq was invaded because Saddam Hussein controlled the amount of oil exports and thus the world price of oil. Persian Gulf I had been fought for the same reasons. Bush Sr --as evil as Jr --was at least smart enough to know when to pull out.

Indeed, Orwell understood as few have the power of language and in, 1984 the "tool of power" is language. The institutions of state maintain power by exploiting the power of language to shape the nature of thought itself. In the novel, 1984, the state manipulation of language is the job of protagonist, Winston Smith. Smith's personal tragedy is symbolic of the tragedy of our civilization, if not our species.

Examples abound in the Bush administration. The Bush regime's use of the phrase "Total Information Awareness" very nearly gave the game away. In response to criticism, the regime stopped using the name "Total Information Awareness" to denote their program of widespread domestic surveillance. But that does not mean that Bush has stopped spying on you, invading your privacy, or violating your Constitutional right to be safe and secure in your own home. It does not mean that your email is not fair game. It does not mean that your phone is not tapped. It does not mean that you have nothing to fear from this venal administration. "Total Information Awareness" is no doubt called something else, a name designed not to attract the attention of the media, a less scary name to lull the "folk".

Orwell is most famous for 1984 but his great essay on politics should also be required reading. He explores how politicians explore language to accrue absolute power.

The White House saw September 11 as a golden opportunity. The first catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil sparked an unprecedented case of leadership projection: desperate for protection and answers (why do they hate us? can we kill them before they kill us?), Americans wishfully compared Bush to FDR and Churchill. Approval ratings hit 92 percent. But Bush's political advisors knew that peaking early wouldn't guarantee reelection in 2004. Bush's father had been turned out of office just 20 months after the Gulf War ratcheted his score up to 91.

The Bushies have lifted their reelection strategy straight out of "1984," and not just by creating ominous-sounding agencies like the Office of Homeland Security, the supposedly-closed Office of Strategic Information, and a "Shadow Government." As in "1984," the Bush regime tolerates zero dissent --a two-party system in name only has been distilled to one in which only Republicans express acceptable opinions. And an absence of follow-up attacks has been met by endless alerts, advisors and empty hysterics in the name of security, most recently culminating with Tom Ridge's much-mocked color-code warning system.

In fact, all who have read Orwell's essay on how easily politicians debase the language for nefarious purposes have recognized in the Bush administration the very techniques that Orwell warned us about.

To be fair, it is not only politicians but bullshit artists who have made us vulnerable to tyranny. This is done by dumbing down the language, dumbing down our ability to think critically.

As I have tried to show, modern writing at its worst does not consist in picking out words for the sake of their meaning and inventing images in order to make the meaning clearer. It consists in gumming together long strips of words which have already been set in order by someone else, and making the results presentable by sheer humbug. The attraction of this way of writing is that it is easy. It is easier -- even quicker, once you have the habit -- to say In my opinion it is not an unjustifiable assumption that than to say I think. If you use ready-made phrases, you not only don't have to hunt about for the words; you also don't have to bother with the rhythms of your sentences since these phrases are generally so arranged as to be more or less euphonious.

Until Bush, even Republican "Presidents" paid lip service to the Constitution. But there were warnings.

“"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross."”

—Sinclair Lewis, author of "It Can't Happen here!

The characteristics of the fascist state so vividly described by both authors are to be found in abundance in Bush's fascist regime. That millions are in denial is merely evidence of the truth that is denied.

A quote from Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here":

"Senator Windrip has got an excellent chance to be elected President, next November, and if he is, probably his gang of buzzards will get us into some war, just to grease their insane vanity and show the world that we’re the huskiest nation going." – page Page 20, It Can't Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis

Clearly —Orwell and Lewis not only warned us, they predicted very precisely how it would be done. As Shakespeare would have said: "All is true!"

So --why didn't we listen? Because this nation has a fierce anti-intellectual streak which at its best makes us independent but at its worst makes us stupid!

09/13/07 "The Canadian" --- - Critically exploring whether or not there was a covert attempt to instigate a catastrophic nuclear war against Iran is illuminated through an introduction using the recent B-52 Incident. On August 30, a B-52 bomber armed with five nuclear-tipped Advanced Cruise missiles travelled from Minot Air Force base, North Dakota, to Barksdale Air Force base, Louisiana, in the United States. Each missile had an adjustable yield between five and 150 kilotons of TNT which is at the lower end of the destructive capacities of U.S. nuclear weapons. For example, the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima had a yield of 13 kilotons, while the Bravo Hydrogen bomb test of 1954 had a yield of 15,000 kilotons. The B-52 story was first covered in the Army Times on 5 September after the nuclear armed aircraft was discovered by Airmen. LINK

What made this a very significant event was that it was a violation of U.S. Air Force regulations concerning the transportation of nuclear weapons by air. Nuclear weapons are normally transported by air in specially constructed planes designed to prevent radioactive pollution in case of a crash. Such transport planes are not equipped to launch the nuclear weapons they routinely carry around the U.S. and the world for servicing or positioning.

The discovery of the nuclear armed B-52 was, according to Hans Kristensen, a nuclear weapons expert at the Federation of American Scientists, the first time in 40 years that a nuclear armed plane had been allowed to fly in the U.S. LINK. Since 1968, after a SAC bomber crashed in Greenland, all nuclear armed aircraft have been grounded but were kept on a constant state of alert. After the end of the Cold War, President George H. Bush ordered in 1991 that nuclear weapons were to be removed from all aircraft and stored in nearby facilities. ...

What Bush's Nuclear Holocaust Might Look Like

Bush is a threat to civilization, possibly to most life on this planet. This update from Buzzflash:

Thursday, September 13, 2007

One day after Gen Petraeus reassured an increasingly hostile Congress that things were actually going according to plan in Iraq, a bomb --in Iraq's western province of al-Anbar --kills the head of the US backed Sunni alliance. [See: Iraqi insurgents kill key US ally ] It will be interesting to see how Bush's gang of venal crooks try to spin this one.

Screw Bush's "intentions" in Iraq. We've heard the speculation before. It's about oil. The chaos is deliberate! Bush is actually succeeding in achieving his goals.

I don't care what Bush's personal goals are. Accident or deliberate, chaos is still chaos. Whether it works for Bush's goals or not, mass murder is still mass murder, war crimes are war crimes. I don't care whether Bush gets his jollies hearing about Abu Ghraib tortures, it is still a crime, perverted and punishable under international conventions. Whatever Bush's intentions, the war against Iraq is a war crime prohibited by our own federal statutes. They state clearly that what Bush has done in and to Iraq is punishable by death. Bush is a felon and there is probable cause to charge him with mass murder.

Am I getting through to anyone? Or --do Americans no longer care what their "presidents" do? Let's take a sober look at the facts. What Bush has done in Iraq is punishable by death. In our system, charges are brought when there is "probable cause" that a crime has been committed. There is, in fact, right now, probable cause to bring just such charges against George W. Bush.

It gets worse.

Gen. Betrayus should be fired and retired. Clearly --the speech he read had been written for him by Bush's propagandists and focus groups. Clearly, he put his own lousy career ahead of the truth, the interest of the American people. Such venality approaches high treason.

It's time to take a good, hard look at the scam, the fraud that this gang of GOP Bushies and hang overs from the Reagan years have perpetrated upon this nation. It's time to round up every one of the crooks and put them on trial for the capital crimes that they have committed under the cover of our national sovereignty.

There is a word for that. High treason. When "integrity" still had meaning, high treason was hanging offense.

(a) Offense.— Whoever, whether inside or outside the United States, commits a war crime, in any of the circumstances described in subsection (b), shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for life or any term of years, or both, and if death results to the victim, shall also be subject to the penalty of death.

By PeterBergen and Paul CruickshankResearch fellows at the Center on Law and Security at the NYU School of Law. Bergen is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation in Washington, D.C.

"If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq, they would not be idle. They would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders. By fighting these terrorists in Iraq, Americans in uniform are defeating a direct threat to the American people." So said President Bush on November 30, 2005, refining his earlier call to "bring them on." Jihadist terrorists, the administration’s argument went, would be drawn to Iraq like moths to a flame, and would perish there rather than wreak havoc elsewhere in the world.

The president’s argument conveyed two important assumptions: first, that the threat of jihadist terrorism to US interests would have been greater without the war in Iraq, and second, that the war is reducing the overall global pool of terrorists. However, the White House has never cited any evidence for either of these assumptions, and none appears to be publicly available.

The administration’s own National Intelligence Estimate on "Trends in Global Terrorism: implications for the United States," circulated within the government in April 2006 and partially declassified in October, states that "the Iraq War has become the ‘cause celebre’ for jihadists...and is shaping a new generation of terrorist leaders and operatives."

Iraq is falling apart. The world has become a more dangerous place amid increasing terrorism. It does not surprise me. I've been writing about it for almost ten years now. More recently, I was attacked by the Heritage Foundation for daring to quote FBI stats that support what I have been saying for years: Terrorism is Always Worse Under GOP Regimes.

So much so that one would think GOP regimes cause terrorism. According to FBI stats, terrorism has been worse under GOP regimes at least since 1980. Reagan's "War on Terrorism" caused terrorism, or at least, made it worse. During a period of two years, terrorist attacks against the United States increased. [Source: Total Acts of Terrorism in the US 1980-98, America's Response to Terrorism, The Brookings Institution (Based on FBI Statistics)]

Some history is needed to put this all in context. Ronald Reagan ordered a US invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and, like Bush now, his invasion was premised upon what was politely called a "deceitful pretext", in other words - a lie! The "pretext" was that the PLO, called a terrorist organization, had shot the Israeli ambassador to London. In fact, the shooter may never have been a PLO member.[Fading Illusions: D-Day and Reagan].

...

Like Iraq today, the Lebanon Reagan invaded became a magnet for various "terrorist groups". They grew more active over the duration of the American occupation. Armed and dangerous, they tested Reagan's resolve and eventually won. Like Bush today, Reagan's definition of victory was defined with meaningless slogans -like "you can run but you can't hide". They did both and then counter-attacked. Reagan lost his war against "terrorism".

Terrorism, in fact, grew worse over the two years that he waged it. The trend did not abate until Bill Clinton became President. There were about three times as many terrorist attacks against US interests during the Reagan regime than against US interests under Bill Clinton.

Nevertheless, Reagan's adventure in Lebanon is remembered for two things: a) the thousands of lives lost amid even more waves of refugees; b) Reagan's ignominious pull-out following the bombing of the US marine barracks. Thought cowardly at the time, it may be too charitable in retrospect to attribute to Reagan remorse for having wrongly invaded to begin with. That's too much to expect from the GOP. In this earlier invasion, Ronald Reagan supported Israel just as Bush has more recently, just as the US always has. [See: Reagan Orders Marines Out of Lebanon]

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

Operation Iraqi Freedom, it turns out, was never a war against Saddam ­Hussein's Iraq. It was an invasion of the federal budget, and no occupying force in history has ever been this efficient. George W. Bush's war in the Mesopotamian desert was an experiment of sorts, a crude first take at his vision of a fully privatized American government. In Iraq the lines between essential government services and for-profit enterprises have been blurred to the point of absurdity -- to the point where wounded soldiers have to pay retail prices for fresh underwear, where modern-day chattel are imported from the Third World at slave wages to peel the potatoes we once assigned to grunts in KP, where private companies are guaranteed huge profits no matter how badly they fuck things up.

And just maybe, reviewing this appalling history of invoicing orgies and million-dollar boondoggles, it's not so far-fetched to think that this is the way someone up there would like things run all over -- not just in Iraq but in Iowa, too, with the state police working for Corrections Corporation of America, and DHL with the contract to deliver every Christmas card. And why not? What the Bush administration has created in Iraq is a sort of paradise of perverted capitalism, where revenues are forcibly extracted from the customer by the state, and obscene profits are handed out not by the market but by an unaccountable government bureauc­racy. This is the triumphant culmination of two centuries of flawed white-people thinking, a preposterous mix of authoritarian socialism and laissez-faire profit­eering, with all the worst aspects of both ideologies rolled up into one pointless, supremely idiotic military adventure -- American men and women dying by the thousands, so that Karl Marx and Adam Smith can blow each other in a Middle Eastern glory hole.